Our cider making method dates back 2,000 years, and it still produces the best quality cider. We continue our old fashioned methods in the manufacture of our many other products as well. Our fruit butters and preserves are made using the "open kettle" method.

If you aren’t familiar with apple butter, you will have shocked Apple Butter Lovers everywhere! But not to worry, we’re willing to share the love! Fruit butter is a spread made of fruit cooked down to a creamy paste that is lightly sweetened and flavored with spices. It falls into the same category as jelly and jam, yet has its own personality. Apple butter is the most popular example of fruit butter. The fruit is cooked, but not too much, because fruit will burn and lose its sugary taste. If correctly done, fruit butter, true to the “butter” part of its name, has the same texture as, but a different flavor than, regular butter. In the instance of apple butter, it’s not lumpy like apple sauce and is sweeter. Delicious spread over toast, it has a rather whipped butter consistency.

In the colonial days, when our country wasn’t yet independent of the British, apple butter was a popular way of keeping apples in America. It’s not really known where the idea came from — some give the credit to New England for apple butter — and a number of historians believe it arrived to the Americas via the Pennsylvania Dutch. And there’s a strong belief that the technique was spread throughout the new world by the pioneers from Pennsylvania as they forged westward.

The early settlers of our country made fruit butter a community event around the harvest season. Young and old participated in apple butter boiling in some fashion. After the fall harvest, once corn had been cut, pumpkins gathered and grapes picked, it was time to pick and pick-up apples. As the autumn’s bright leaves warned of winter, the festivities began very early and went on until night fall and beyond. These gatherings celebrated with music, singing, dancing and chatting in order to catch up on the news. Such festivities made the work of preparing food for the bitter cold and scarcity of food in the winter much easier and more fun to work through. Everyone in the community was invited to attend the boiling of apples by a crier that was sent from farm to farm. Usually the host farm for the apple butter making event provided meals of ham, fried chicken and all sorts of bounty from the land to allow people to take turns eating and keeping the apple butter stirred. Stirring the apple butter was an important job and somebody had to be doing it all the time. You might have heard the phrase “twice around the outside and once through the middle”. It refers to the stirring of the big kettles to keep from burning the precious content. This also became a familiar square dance call for the pioneers at barn raising events and other such celebrations!